Hermitage Museum to Get Big Face Lift
One of the world’s greatest art museums, the Hermitage in Leningrad, will enter the 21st Century with a new look under restoration plans due to begin next year, the newspaper Soviet Culture reported Saturday.
Hermitage director Boris Piotrovsky told the newspaper that the museum will remain open throughout the restoration work, due for completion in the year 2005, although galleries housing its vast collections would close temporarily.
“For a long time, the Hermitage has felt a lack of space,” Piotrovsky said.
The main edifice of the present-day Hermitage, the Winter Palace, was built in the mid-18th Century as a residence for the czars after Peter the Great moved the Russian capital to St. Petersburg, renamed Leningrad following the Bolshevik Revolution.
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